- Title: Scientists split water into hydrogen and oxygen with just sunlight
- Date: 25th September 2018
- Summary: KFAR ADUMIM, WEST BANK (FILE) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF SUN SHINING IN JUDEAN DESERT PARIS, FRANCE (FILE) (REUTERS) FOUNTAIN WITH SUN IN SKY TORONTO, CANADA (FILE) (REUTERS) MEADOW VARIOUS OF MONARCH BUTTERFLY RED ADMIRAL BUTTERFLY BIRDS FLYING OVERHEAD IN FORMATION VARIOUS OF MEADOW AND WETLAND
- Embargoed: 9th October 2018 15:15
- Keywords: Artificial semi-natural synthetic photosynthesis split splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen with sunlight separating h2o water and hydrogen
- Location: CAMBRIDGE & SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND, UK / KFAR ADUMIM, WEST BANK / PARIS, FRANCE / TORONTO, CANADA / KAMUTHI, TAMIL NADU, INDIA
- City: CAMBRIDGE & SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND, UK / KFAR ADUMIM, WEST BANK / PARIS, FRANCE / TORONTO, CANADA / KAMUTHI, TAMIL NADU, INDIA
- Country: United Kingdom
- Topics: Life Sciences,Science
- Reuters ID: LVA0018Z4ITZV
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Scientists have achieved the long-standing goal of reproducing photosynthesis in a laboratory, using only the power of sunlight.
Photosynthesis is the process plants use to convert sunlight and water into energy, or sugar, leaving oxygen behind as a by-product.
"In our case, we don't exactly replicate nature, because in nature the end product is glucose or sugars. In our case, we use sunlight and water to produce oxygen and hydrogen. It's a much simpler, cleaner process," University of Cambridge Chemistry PhD student Katarzyna Sokol told Reuters.
Photosynthesis is crucial to life on Earth as the source of nearly all of the world's oxygen, while the hydrogen which is produced when the water is split could be a potentially unlimited source of renewable energy.
The study used semi-artificial photosynthesis to explore new ways to produce and store solar energy, using only natural sunlight and a mixture of biological and man-made components.
Sokol and the team not only improved on the amount of energy produced and stored during the reaction, they also managed to reactivate a process in the algae that has been dormant for millennia.
"In the past when we had no oxygen in the atmosphere, algae or photosynthetic organisms used hydrogen as an energy source and there was an enzyme in algae that enabled this process to happen. But then when the oxygen-rich atmosphere evolved this process an enzyme was switched off and suppressed. So in our project, we wanted to re-activate this pathway and use this enzyme to create this hydrogen production in the process called water splitting," Sokol said.
The method absorbs more solar light than natural photosynthesis, which only evolved to be as good as it needed to be, Sokol said.
The work, published in Nature Energy, outlines how the team developed their platform to achieve unassisted solar-driven water-splitting and could revolutionise the systems used for renewable energy production.
"It's definitely a long standing goal in general in artificial photosynthesis to have bias free systems, so to have systems that could be run purely by solar energy without any additional energy input. So this is a big goal for many different fuels, not only for solar fuels but also for bio-inspired systems," Sokol said. - Copyright Holder: FILE REUTERS (CAN SELL)
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